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Biggest IT Disaster Ever?
lizzyben writes, "Baseline has a major story about a major IT disaster in the UK: 'In 2002, the English government embarked on a $12 billion effort to transform its health-care system with information technology. But the country's oversight agency now puts that figure at $24 billion, and two Members of Parliament say the project is "sleepwalking toward disaster"... In scale, the project... (NPfIT) is overwhelming. Initiated in 2002, the NPfIT is a 10-year project to build new computer systems that would connect more than 100,000 doctors, 380,000 nurses and 50,000 other health-care professionals; allow for the electronic storage and retrieval of patient medical records; permit patients to set up appointments via their computers; and let doctors electronically transmit prescriptions to local pharmacies.'" An Infoworld article from earlier this year sketches some of the all-time greatest IT meltdowns.
Things here in the UK always seem to be thought of as failing or disaster before they're completed. I'm sure we hate success as a nation. We also have a huge obsession with celebrity and magazines that publish how fat celebrities are, or how their lives are in a mess always do very well.
I say wait until the project's finished before kicking it to the ground.
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'In 2002, the English government embarked on a $12 billion effort to transform its health-care system with information technology. But the country's oversight agency now puts that figure at $24 billion
I imagine if you're the company getting paid the $24 billion, the project is a tremendous success.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
and see if getting a metric ton of vendors to make their various bits all work together in some new way to deploy mega-healthcare infrastructure gets close to working. One vendor typically does not want to know or care to know what the others are doing which makes for lots of daily progress.
Oh wait, then there's the legacy system vendors.
Easy, in fact, too easy to take shots at programs like this.
They stand such a high rate of failure that incremental change should have been adopted in the first place. The politicians behind this one have all disowned the project by now I'm sure.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
In fact, the most successful large scale projects always seem to be grown out of combinations of smaller architectures rather than a single massive architecture. Look at the Internet for an example. The protocol was architected. The routing design was architected. The information delivery systems were architected. The network itself? Grown with tender loving care, and Lots'o'peering agreements.
If you want to solve an issue like modernizing Hospital IT, start small and work your way up. Design each technology independently, but not monolithically. Keep an eye toward standards rather than specific implementations. (Standards will allow you to plug in a few competing implementations, giving you "best of breed" options.) Then use those technologies to build out a few test sites. Work out the kinks, then start deploying at a few more sites. Keep doing that, and the economics of scale will begin to take hold. (i.e. The more you do of something, the less expensive it gets to do it.) With any luck, the project will get done within a reasonable budget and timeline.
Never mind what I just said. There's your answer right there.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Those "three words" together are four words.
And excellent steak analogy, but you forgot to include the circumstances that prompt the need for a government managed health care system in the first place -- what happens when the restaurants sell so many burgers and so few steaks that they need to manipulate their pricing structure until those burgers become the price of steaks? Or when they decide to just stop serving burgers entirely and choose instead to offer a 'name brand equivalent' like maybe some ground buffalo, which tastes just the same, but costs a whole lot more? And what happens to the individuals who desperately NEED those steaks but can only afford a small side salad? There's a big difference between 'subsidizing irresponsibility' and sharing costs to help treat people with terminal and degenerative diseases who are incapable of generating a full-time income.
It never ceases to amaze me that there are people who will apply the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality to those suffering from Muscular Dystrophy, ALS, Leukemia and all of those others afflictions that obviously afflict far more than just the 'lazy' and 'irresponsible'. Is this compassionate conservatism in action?
From the article:
That last sentence made my jaw drop. How someone in his position could so blatantly avoid consulting anyone with any technical acumen is beyond me. Yes, it's possible, that no single vendor was capable of creating such a system alone. But the vast majority of a project like this is about creating a single process for every use case that the system is designed to handle. As such, the project shouldn't ever be broken down into groupings like number of patients in the system. Computers are great at handling really large numbers when the software is designed up-front to scale to really large numbers. The system should have been broken down into separate processes for which individual vendors would handle that single process (or grouping of processes) for everyone in the country.
The X-Ray example is a perfect one. Why would anyone in their right mind have 5 separate vendors all attempt to implement a solution for the problem that was only applied to the region they managed? At best, one region would end up with a solution that was better than every other region. However a competant management decision would have been to look for a vendor that could handle *only* the process of integrating the country's X-ray facilities with the country's high-speed data network. Another vendor would be responsible for supplying and maintaing that network. Still another vendor would be responsible for maintaining the huge data center (or centers) where information was housed. Just off the top of my head, GE could be responsible for the X-Ray integration (I know they have the necessary expertise), BT could handle high-speed network (among others, but why use foreign expertise when a UK company could handle it). And there are any number of competant vendors that could handle a high-availability server environment with a massive database.
Basically, had they had anyone with have an ounce of technical acumen, they would have devided the project up along functional boundaries of the application rather than regional boundaries of the country. That way, even if some of the projects went horribly over-budget, at least some of the project would be useful. Now, because of the inept management decisions, the whole thing is a train wreck.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Is this compassionate conservatism in action?
You forget. The compassion in compassionate conservatism is the lovely warm feeling one gets in one's heart when scattering breadcrumbs at Christmas to those poor, adorable, starving orphans.
Charity will help out the most needy, remember?
Fuck anyone who's suffering from an unfashionable or distasteful illness; they only brought it upon themselves. The good old mom-and-pop doctor will solve everything else - that's what capitalism is for!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I have what I call the "oh, crap" words and phrases list. If I see more than two of those words in a project file, I know that the project will be a huge steaming pile.
The article has no less than eleven of those warning signs.
transform
Accenture
Gartner
government
Microsoft
management consultant
Computer Sciences Corp.
in the world
comprehensive
leading-edge
I am not at all surprised that this is a gargantuan boondoggle.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
I'm sorry but did you even take time to read the article? I ask because you make statements about saying stuff like this: When a competitive free market group of companies goes after work, they have to balance their profit versus their ability versus the good use of their time. If you bid a job and win it, there's no going back and asking for more. But that's exactly what the article talks about. Accenture was the prime, or at least had the majority of the contract and they screwed up spent a lot of the governments money and quit .
Then you talk about universal health care? What does that have to do with TFA? If I had to guess I would just say you read the title and picked out some of your favorite arguments that had nothing to do with TFA and strung them together to get a +5 insightful. Congradulations you know how to play to the mindless sheep.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
You're comparing purposefully designed flaws done by the CIA with Microsoft incompetence? THat's kind of a stretch.
More importantly, perhaps, was the fact that the CIA was also screwing with the HARDWARE at a manufacturing level.
Frankly, your entire argument doesn't make sense at any level. If the Soviets had the people to check the software in-house, it would have been far more reasonable and realistic for them to make the software in-house too. Instead, the entire REASON the KGB was stealing this software was because they COULDN'T develop it themselves.
For god's sake, the KGB was stealing American technology and the CIA introduced purposeful bugs to counter them. That's got abso-fucking-lutely nothing do to with IT and everything to do with spycraft.
Only an absurd zealot would be in able to connect that somehow to Microsoft being bad.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
get this - Halliburton *has* a UK division, and they are actually the main project management company responsible - they received all the cash from the UK government, and are responsible for handing out the money to the subcontractors that build the various systems. I have been involved in the past in several different aspects of the tendering and scoping of parts of this project. It outright disgusting
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
> If, as you maintain, more government == more disaster wouldn't it stand to reason that these socialist model health systems would be doing worse than the US system?
Only if they truly have more government. If you look at total cost of government there really isn't any nation in the world which is as expensive as the US. If you diligently keep track of your taxes--on your paycheck, at the cash register, at the pump, extras for sin taxes and luxury items, real estate, utilities, taxes on shipping which you indirectly pay in the cost of the products that you buy, on and on for every little nickel and dime hidden tax--you'll find that nearly 70% of total annual income for the average American is returned to the government over the course of the year.
Most of the socialist nations don't come anywhere near to taxing their citizens this much. The US truly has the most government and, therefore, the most bureaucratic disaster.
Hustlers exist solely through charity. I see their scams, lies, and deceit: I'm too charitable to outright shoot them.